On the road home from town over the holidays, I counted four camper vans for every 10 cars that passed.
While this is good if you're playing car cricket (a passing car scores one point, a camper four points and a massive truck gets you a six), it is a somewhat crazy indictment of how the face of travel has changed here this century.
If there's a record of how many camper van bed-nights we do in New Zealand every year, I can't find it.
Even if I could, it would only tell part of the story, thanks to those who choose to camp outside the designated limits of camping grounds and parks that charge a fee.
Freedom campers.
To some, the scourge of a nation, to others an inalienable right.
For most of us, probably somewhere in between.
As one of the characters in my play, It's Your Sh*t, says, ''I get it, I do. I mean, camping, it's my Kiwi birthright. But it's just too much.''
If you're playing car cricket up at Lake Dunstan of a morning, you could probably score big counting all the white vans clustered around the toilets there.
I understand it's much the same at Macandrew Bay in Dunedin, where the view is mostly of other vans.
And that most councils around the country are cracking down on the camper van epidemic.
Tourism Eastland, on its website, claims to welcome freedom campers. Except there is a designated season.
And you have to purchase a permit for a specific number of nights. And there are designated parking areas. And that, by definition, is not freedom. Or free.
Freedom camping through Europe last year (yes, with a toilet on board), our family marvelled at the mentality of those who cluster around loos.
Is that, perhaps, what freedom looks like? A vista of vans and a toilet block?
If you want to be properly free, surely you head away from the loopy circus.
But remember well what Eleanor Roosevelt said: ''With great freedom comes great responsibility.''
She wasn't talking about leaving your poos by the side of the road, but someone ought to be.
We met otherwise intelligent people on our travels who genuinely had no idea about the impact that their mess would have on the people or the place they were besmirching.
They'd bought their own vans so there was no rental company to lay the blame on.
Just the sad truth of how disengaged they were from the environment they were purportedly travelling to see. No concept of kaitiakitanga.
Tempers have been flaring high in Hawea over freedom campers for nigh on a decade.
Letters have been written to politicians, rocks rolled over access roads to the beach. There are patrols. Locals have been fined under new legislation for sleeping in their cars rather than driving home drunk.
And still, some of the tourists I meet have no idea why they're being given the brusque knock and the not-on-my-land brush off.
Internet forums debating where and how to freedom camp in New Zealand show angry ranters warning people to stay away. How's that for Kiwi hospitality? Or even common sense?
We entice people to New Zealand with massive pin-ups of our remote beauty and then deny them access to it or send them out woefully undereducated and equipped to cope.
There's a quote by a camper van company spokesperson (I wish I remember which, it's just there's quite a few clones to choose from these days) abdicating responsibility for teaching them toileting etiquette, claiming something along the lines of ''We don't tell them how to vote or what beer to drink - just like we don't say how to use the toilet.''
Well, someone needs to talk loud and dirty about toileting and soon.
Because the legislation passed to keep tourists in order is turning to curtailment on all our freedom.
Because it's really not nice to be nervous about kicking over rocks at a rest stop, just in case.
Because giardia does not make for marketable rivers and, anyway, we're no longer marketing a reality.
Maybe there's a long road ahead for a solution, paved with prohibitive signs, forums and fines.
Or maybe it's as simple as all making like Eleanor Roosevelt and taking responsibility for our actions.
• Liz Breslin's play, It's Your Sh*t, has just finished a successful season in Hawea. The production will run for two nights, May 24-25, in Arrowtown.
