Looking for Sean McLachlan? He mostly hangs out on the Civil War Horror blog these days, but feel free to nose around this blog for some fun older posts!

You can also find him on his Twitter feed and Facebook page.



Tuesday 23 December 2008

I Discovered A New Country


Actually, it was there all along, but I'd never heard of it. I've been to 25 countries and I'm a big fan of maps, so I can tell you where most countries in the world are. I can't remember the last time I came across mention of a country I'd never even heard of, but it happened yesterday.

So what is this country? Niue, a Pacific Island nation northeast of New Zealand with fewer than 2,000 people. It's 269 square kilometers in size. Nieuans have their own distinct language and culture. They also have several articles on Wikipedia. Apparantly they're big into the Internet on Niue.


They're also trying to increase their tourism industry, even though they only have 90 hotel rooms. The islands offers have lots of unspoilt beaches, great scuba diving and snorkeling, and visitors get the bragging rights of having been to a country most people haven't heard of. Hopefully I'll get there someday!

3 comments:

Chris Overstreet said...

Niue has licensed out their ".nu" top level Internet domain (analogous with ".com") as a source of revenue. It's very popular in Scandinavian countries as "nu" means "now" in Swedish, Dutch and Danish. I'm surprised it hasn't taken off in France (where "nu" means "nude"), but the .nu domain people seem to be skittish with regard to certain types of content.

Gone with postcrads said...

Is it governed by New Zealand? But it's famous for stamps.

Sean McLachlan said...

They aren't completely independent. Most of their external affairs are handled by New Zealand and the Queen is head of state (mostly an honorary position, like Canada). I heard about it through Postcrossing, but it doesn't seem to be listed in the countries section anymore. Did the one member from Niue drop out?