salamanca! not, as I used to think, a type of lizard…our sand­wich part­ner would, give or take a few miles, be Sala­man­ca, Spain. We’re not sure if this is the ratio­nale behind the nam­ing of the Kel­burn road that shares the name (a quick Google reveals that Lord Welling­ton fought a famous bat­tle there — in Spain, that is, not up Kel­burn way — in 1812, so most like­ly), but, either way, it’s nice to think that we share a ten­u­ous geo­graph­ic tie with a North Span­ish town that looks like it has some pret­ty nice archi­tec­ture, a pop­u­la­tion of around 180000 (about dou­ble that in the wider region), and a decent cli­mate. Just like home, eh?

Weird­ly enough, the ‘if the earth were a sand­wich’ tool also reveals that the clos­est New Zealand has to a ‘South of France’ is the Chatham Islands. Who’d have thought?