If you’ve ever had the misfortune of finding yourself wandering through the tourist traps of Auckland or Queenstown, you’ll notice a peculiar phenomenon. Amidst the endless aisles of T-shirts with a fat silver fern and enough kiwi-shaped keyrings to sink a small dinghy, you’ll find them. A pair of those frankly ridiculous-looking sheepskin boots. The kind that looks like you’ve strapped a couple of woolly mammoths to your feet.
And who, you might ask, is buying them? Not the local farmer, certainly. He’s too busy trying to get a decent return on his mutton. No, it’s the visitors. The ones who’ve travelled halfway around the world, presumably with a suitcase full of perfectly sensible shoes, only to suddenly decide that what their life is missing is a pair of wool-lined foot-furnaces.
Now, you might think this is an act of sheer madness. And you’d be half right. But the logic is, in a bumbling sort of way, quite brilliant. You see, the Chinese, who are rather good at this sort of thing, have figured something out. They’ve realized that the quality of New Zealand sheep is, to put it mildly, rather exceptional. So, they come, they look at the endless rolling hills covered in a thick blanket of sheep, and they think, ‘Ah, yes. I shall have a bit of that.’
They don’t want the cheap rubbish you can find back home. No, they want the real deal. The boots that smell faintly of lanolin and are so impossibly soft you’d think they were made from the clouds themselves. It’s an act of faith. They are willing to part with a small fortune because they know that what they’re getting is genuine. It’s a bit like buying a Swiss watch. You’re not just buying a timepiece; you’re buying precision, history, and a tiny piece of Alpine magic. In this case, it’s a tiny piece of pastoral, wool-covered magic.
And it’s not just the boots. It’s the honey that costs more than a decent weekend away. It’s the green stone necklaces that look like they’ve been carved by an angry goblin. It’s all part of the same grand, international shopping spree. They’re not just buying souvenirs. They’re buying trust. They’re buying a little slice of a place they’ve heard is clean, unpolluted, and full of products that won’t fall apart after a fortnight.
So yes, the Chinese tourists are absolutely buying the Ugg boots. And in a strange, inexplicable way, I can’t say I blame them. After all, if you’re going to buy a souvenir, it might as well be something so spectacularly ridiculous and yet so undeniably authentic that you’ll look at it years later and remember, with a sigh, that time you were in New Zealand and decided to strap a pair of fluffy clouds to your feet.
Ugg boots – a sheep’s last and arguably best act of kindness.
