Looking-glass land

I had a long post planned about the arbitrary nature of the left-handed driving rule. Surely all reasonable people (e.g. Americans) can agree that driving on the right is the right thing to do. Is it mere affectation that causes the Kiwi nature to favor the left side of the road? Is this simply a rebellion against the natural, American way of things? The surprising answer to these questions will be given below.

When I was walking about in central Auckland, there was a certain direction, toward the harbor that I consistently thought of as "south". This despite the maps that clearly showed the harbor at the top, with a big "N" arrow pointing in that direction. Was it merely because that direction was downhill, and I associated down with south? The answer to this question would have to wait until an epiphanous moment.

The night of December the 31st I found a delightful campsite near Kawakawa Bay. It was the kind of campsite almost ideal for bicycle camping because while being close to the road, and thus easy to push one's bicycle to, it was also behind a ridge and thick vegetation and thus completely invisible to the passing motorist. There I set up camp, eschewing shelter for the night to sleep instead under the strange stars, as mediated by the trees and mosquito netting. Needless to say matters of direction were near to mind.

It was when the fireworks started, pounding through the forest and into the sensitive corners of my mind that I realized the true nature of things. The sun here is predominantly from the north, rather than the south, and so subconsciously I assigned the opposite cardinal directions to north and south. Needless to say east and west were always clear, since the sun still rises from the same direction. It all came together: the reversal of one of the cardinal directions, the inverted phases of the moon, the reversed direction of driving: New Zealand is like a mirror world, what physicists would call a parity inversion. New Zealand may not drastically differ from the US, but it is like the same land as seen in a mirror.

There is one difficulty with this, which is that Kiwis maintain the same names for left and right, clothes button on the same side, and the direction of writing remains the same. This could perhaps be explained by noting that these are only cultural differences, and in fact cultural directions imported from abroad, like me. The natural order of things, comprising shadows and the driving direction, are reversed.

There is only one way to satisfy this question completely, and that relies on the fact that the fundamental force of nature known as "weak" exhibits parity effects. If my conjecture is correct, and all natural directions are here reversed, parity-breaking weak force experiments should here be reverse of those in the United States. If anyone can find an appropriate experiment I can conduct, costing less than $100 and taking at most 2kg of materials, I will be sure to conduct it here in the wild and confirm or disprove this conjecture.