Police officers who carry guns. There’s also no local police forces. It’s just the nationwide NZ Police.

Lots of car crashes. Maybe it’s the left-side driving or the calm kiwis behind the wheel, but haven’t seen any fender-benders yet.

Barren hills. All that rainfall goes to good use, sprouting trees everywhere. The random palm trees imported from America, I guess, and the pine trees grown here to sell elsewhere stick out like sore thumbs.

Natives who don’t have a bit of a tan. The weak ozone layer at the bottom of the globe means solar radiation is exceptionally strong here.

A boring night sky. We camped at several dark, desolate beaches. That left unimaginable views of the Milky Way and what we learned were a couple of planets.

Fat locals. Everything here is a workout. Auckland is known as the City of Sails, though City of Hills could work too. That’s why it reminds me so much of San Francisco. Of the 12 days we’ve been here, I’m confident there’s only been two days that I haven’t been bruised, scraped, bitten by a bug or left sore.

Our restless first week in New Zealand was all about doing things I’ve never done before. Here are the highlights:

A brilliant entrepreneur came out to our hostel to teach us how to do one version of  haka, the war dance of the indigenous Maori civilization. The cool fact: At the end of the dance, the warriors would stick out their tongues. The length of the tongue was believed to correspond to the length of the man’s penis, and thus his strength as a warrior. The traditional haka performed by the All Blacks celebrates the wife of a Maori tribal chief who protected the hiding spot of another chief. He was under attack, but his attackers were not allowed to touch the woman. That left him unscathed.

The basics of touch rugby are pretty straightforward. Two teams face each other trying to stop the other from touching the ball on the ground in their opponent’s end zone. A team gets six touches, or downs, before their drive ends and a turnover is forced. The strangest thing is keeping a five foot neutral zone at the beginning of each down. A defensive player can’t encroach on the neutral zone until the ballcarrier runs forward or passes the ball. All passes, of course, must be sideways or backwards.

I was not inclined to go zorbing because it seemed kind of dumb. After I was told the sport was invented in New Zealand, I decided I had to try it. Zorbing is pretty much like being in a human washing machine. In a ball filled with about a foot of water within another ball, you roll down a hill either zig-zagging or straight-down. I just sat criss-crossed on the ground and paddled the water. I’m not quite sure that did anything.

We white-water rafted off the tallest waterfall in the world that a private company takes groups over. The seven-meter fall almost saw me end up in the waterfall but our steward, who was on the back of the raft next to me, pressed down on my head so that I stayed in the vessel. I’m pretty sure I blacked out somewhere in there. I thought this was the most awesome thing I had done in my life, but then…

The next day we swam, crawled, waded, black-water tubed and squeezed through a cave. I’ve shifted through my share of fences on runs and such, but I had never been through as many tight squeezes as in this cave. To get in our inner tubes the first time required a backwards dive off the middle of a rock wall. My landing didn’t quite work out and I drank some water — further proof that me and water aren’t good friends. The few times we turned off our helmet lights were daunting. It’s so dark that you would think you were dead.

Watching a New Zealand movie that was described by one person as Wedding Crashers meets Hangover meant seeing shots of Auckland’s skyline were I would have been accustomed to seeing L.A.’s. The raunchy comedy moved a little slow, was unsurprising and generally lackluster. Another cool fact: The radio stations here don’t even bleep out the N-word, let alone curse words.

I’ve visited every single one of them except the new Miami Marlins stadium. The Oakland picture is from Creative Commons because, sadly, I can’t locate my own album from that weekend trip.

What exactly does a team president for a sports franchise do?
Michael Cramer, executive director of The Texas Program in Sports and Media, formerly served as president of the Texas Rangers and the Dallas Stars.

His answer: “Pretty much everything except selecting the players and general manager.”

Of course, he said, “It really depends on the team and the extent of the ownership.”

As a result, most of his time was consumed by selling sponsorships and trying to build new stadiums.

Cramer acknowledged that he worked closely with Rangers owner Tom Hicks when deciding on general managers and managers. He admitted that they considered how different hires might affect ticket sales and the team brand.

That thinking might have played a role in Hicks’ desire to go after “top-shelf” people like John Hart as general manager and Buck Showalter as manager.

Before hiring the duo, Hicks, Cramer and their crew enlisted  Dallas-based recruiter Bob Beaudine to draft a book on possible candidates. The list turned up some “non-top-of-the-list candidates,” as Cramer described them. One of those being Oakland Athletics’ scouting director Grady Fuson, who would eventually move up the ranks with the Rangers. But Hicks stuck with his original guts and went with the big names.

“Many candidates wouldn’t have surfaced if you just started calling people you know,” Cramer said. “But the results were mixed.”

Other tidbits from Cramer:

• Resigning is usually a meeting of the minds between the person leaving and the management staying behind. Both sides know when the time is up. Players get old and sometimes its not a team that matches the manager anymore.
• The only real downside to being an interim manager, Cramer said, is that you know you are “being scrutinized heavily and that you could be out on the street next year.” But you have to remember that you are “making tons of more money and have an opportunity to show that I am deserving of it.”
• Turning down an offer to become an interim manager could backfire. So why would you turn down the visibility and money?

Though a fire alarm going off cut my interview short, I also spoke with former Georgetown basketball coach Craig Esherick. He’s now an assistant professor of sport management at George Mason University and color commentator for college basketball games.

He went to law school and even joined the D.C. bar, but he put his career on hold to become an assistant coach for John Thompson at Georgetown. Why?

“An opportunity to be an assistant coach might not always be there,” he said. “I knew my law degree would always be there.”

He started off as a graduate assistant, saying that his four years as a player there served as the interview. He then became an assistant coach and finally the head coach after Thompson retired.

Esherick wasn’t happy when he was fired after Georgetown’s worst season in 31 years. Esherick had a record of 103-74 over the years and the university president had offered him a vote of confidence just days before. Esherick said he had no idea what the president was thinking.

I’ve found great success saving money by buying tickets to sports events from websites such as Stubhub, RazorGator and TicketCity. I even unsuccessfully tried to sell tickets on Stubhub once to a Washington Nationals game that got rained out and I could no longer attend.

But the secondary ticket websites are not without their annoyances. You never really know the final price until right before you hit the “confirm purchase” button. There’s the shipping fees and the convenience fees of about 10 percent. The primary ticket market, of course, isn’t much better.

On my radio show about the business of sports on KXSC, I chatted with Stubhub flack Joellen Ferrer and TicketsNow SVP and GM Julia Vander Ploeg.

Here’s some of the facts they offered:

• More than 50 percent of tickets on Stubhub are purchased for below face value.
• The San Francisco Giants have teamed up with Stubhub so a fan could buy tickets two minutes before a game starts, or even after it has started, get a barcode texted or emailed to them and enter the stadium by having the stadium workers scan the barcode on the phone. Stubhub can’t wait to expand this to a larger audience.
• About 50 percent of tickets on secondary market are still sold outside of venues, mostly by scalpers.
• Through Stubhub, you can buy tickets for about 90 percent of events right up to the last minute.
• Eventually Ticketmaster, which owns TicketsNow, hopes to create an integrated marketplace that would combine primary- and secondary-market tickets onto one list. That way you don’t have to dig through both websites. Seatgeek tries to do that by combining tickets from all the secondary ticket websites into one list, but the data is always a few hours behind.
• Vander Ploeg expects group buying will eventually come to the secondary market. Ticketmaster is now linked up with Facebook, so friends can see where other friends are sitting at events. I just want something that reserves a few seats and lets my friends and I to each pay by ourselves.
• She also said that the secondary ticket market is not always a business that operates at the expense of fans.
• Finally, there will be a dramatic rise in paperless ticketing.