Roadside

confusion

By David North

DOES one drive on the right or the left side of the road?

I used this question as part of PlM’s mail survey of government tourism bureaus figuring that this was the most straight forward tourist question I could devise. I was mistaken. What I thought would be a dull collection of answers (and non-answers) turned into a small adventure. For starters, two of the 27 bureaus queried simply got the answer wrong.

The replies from American Samoa (where there are few tourists) and from the Northern Marianas (where many Japanese tourists visit Saipan) both checked the left box on my one-page letter-and-survey instrument. One drives on the right in both places. The only US jurisdiction where one drives on the left is the US Virgin Islands in the Caribbean as my son Duncan learned abruptly in a front-end, but low-speed collision on beautiful St.

John’s.

Back to my survey one of the more interesting replies was the self contradictory reply for the Galapagos Islands. The box marked “left’* had been checked but below there was this typed message “IF YOU DRIVE

On The Highway You Have

To Go Over Your Right

Side, Because The Other Is

To Come Back.”

One gets the impression of the totally empty road, with one half devoted to your outgoing trip, and other half set aside for your return trip. Then there was the friendly, slightly vague, non confrontational response from the phosphate-rich, one-road Republic of Nauru “Last time I was driving everyone else was driving on the left side of the road.”

The most satisfying response of them all different from all of the above came from Panifilo Etuale, the infor mation officer in the Office of Tokelau Affairs, in Apia “I am ... sorry to inform you that we have no vehicles back in the islands.”

The survey also turned up some of the cheapest, short-term driving li cences in the world. In response to

another question, Pitcairn said that it would provide one to a tourist for 30 cents (US), while Nauru charged 45 cents. (Why bother with charges like these? Why not give the licences away, or charge a meaningful amount of money?) Getting back to the orignal question, Easter Island, Tahiti, Western Samoa, and the US flag islands in the Pacific prefer you to drive on the right; most of the other respondents, all ex-Brit colonies, prefer the left. These include: the Cooks, Lord Howe and Norfolk (both Australian), Nauru and Pitcairn.

And there is the open question about the Galapagos.

Most of the larger islands on the left side of the Pacific map, by the way, use the left side of the road. These are New Zealand, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Japan. And all the nations, on the right side of the Pacific, from Canada down to Chile, drive on the right.

And then there are the 14 laid back tourist bureaus in 14 South Pacific islands that, six weeks later, had not responded to my query, even though they had the option of sending me a fax.

Maybe the best way to secure the answer to the right-left question is to watch the traffic once you arrive, and drive accordingly. □