To the outsider, New Zealand's most distinctive feature is the country's extraordinary isolation, or what the nineteenth-century English novelist Anthony Trollope called "the feeling of awful distance." No other major place of human settlement is situated so far from other large centers of population. The country's closest neighbor is Australia, some 1,200 miles away - farther than the distance from Los Angeles to Chicago. The nearest continent is South America, over 4,000 miles to the east, while Asia lies 5,000 miles to the north. Americans living in Alaska are still much closer to major centers of population.